A Year in Reading: Carolyn Kellogg

Related Books:

Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, by Wesley Stace: I had a college roommate who was obsessed with John Wesley Harding. She played his music constantly, went to every show, cherished the dream that he would become her betrothed, sweeping her off to a life of bliss. The more I heard, the less I could stand. And yet John Wesley Harding, who uses his not-stage name, Wesley Stace, when he’s writing, wrote one of my favorite books of 2011. Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer is a story of creativity and expropriation with murder, of course. The genius-and-envy tensions between two musicians in the early 20th-century England play out in the style of Salieri and Mozart, told by a funnily pretentious, unreliable narrator. Just as his voice gets to be a little too much, the book makes a turn, and the plot cinches with a cleverness and perfection rarely found in literary fiction, which this is. It’s really terrific. It’s even made me like John Wesley Harding’s music, after all.

Todd Zuniga is the founding editor of Opium Magazine and a co-founder of the Literary Death Match reading series. His fiction has appeared most recently in Canteen. He’s now at work on the tentatively titled Passport, a non-fiction collection about memory and home that covers 20 countries.I feel ridiculous even listing it because of its popularity (and my tardiness to the party), but The Road by Cormac McCarthy is the book I read this year that most reminded me of two things: why I love to I write, and why I love books. It worked deep into me, so much that I ended a date prematurely with a beautiful, funny, charming woman just so I could take the longest possible subway ride home to burn through more of it. I love how it challenged my eternal optimism, how I kept wanting and wanting and wanting for things to be okay. Then there was a moment when I was as worn out as The Man and The Boy, and I threw my hands up, and said, “Fine! You win! It’s not going to be okay! There is no redemption!” And then, after starving us of it for so many pages, there’s humanity and there’s hope.More from A Year in Reading 2008

I discovered Season Evans’ blog after she, a Philly native, gave me some advice about my new city. Now she’s come through again with a post about the best books she read this year:On the top of my list is Play It As it Lays by Joan Didion. The focus is so strong and so sure and so meticulous. Each time I read anything she writes, whether it’s a novel or an essay, I learn just a little bit more about the potency of precise narrative. The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D’Ambrosio came in a close second for its succinct and arresting prose style. In third place is Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson because it is the book I wanted to write.Others:The Rainbow Stories by William T. VollmannInfinite Jest by David Foster WallaceFicciones by Jorge Luis BorgesPlatform by Michel HouellebecqThanks Season!